


Circuitous

by rageprufrock



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-25
Updated: 2010-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-14 02:46:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. John Sheppard was not as excited about joining the project as Rodney was to have him on board.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“And then he said, ‘McKay, I can’t tell if you’re the best or worst soldier I ever had,’” Rodney mimicked, striding down the indeterminately gray hallway.

“I can’t imagine why,” Dr. Weir said dryly.

“I know, can you believe that?” Rodney demanded.

“I’ll try to keep the righteous fury on your behalf off of my face if I ever see your former commanding officer, Rodney,” she allowed, smiling crookedly and hooking a left down another corridor. She cleared her throat and said, “Has there been any further luck in marrying the Ancient technology to our own?”

“No,” Rodney said bitterly. “And Beckett, that coward, doesn’t want anything to do with it. He’s been hiding from me for almost two days now.”

“He isn’t actually a guinea pig, Major,” Weir said gently.

Rodney raised an eyebrow in challenge; he’d already been having this fight with Carson for two and a half months. “He is the person on this base with the strongest Ancient gene—he’s defaulted into the role of the guinea pig.”

“Hm,” Weir said, turning to glance at her armful of files. “Well, perhaps you’ll have better luck once General O’Neill returns with the latest recruit.”

Rodney snorted, which he felt was plenty to express how he felt about that. Just like Americans to throw money and manpower at a problem instead of actually thinking it through. There had already been at least three total hacks invited to the Antarctica base, all total washouts who freaked out at the first mention of aliens or death or traveling through a wormhole.

“Carter’s beautiful, don’t get me wrong,” Rodney said as diplomatically as he could manage—which according to the same former CO was ‘diplomatic as horse shit’—while keeping a straight face, “but her judgment insofar as discovering scientific talent peaked when she came knocking on my door and has only careened downhill since.”

Weir rolled her eyes tolerantly, and Rodney couldn’t help but like her at that.

He hadn’t exactly been stifled at his old post, but he was certainly wasted, and so far Elizabeth had treated him more like a member of the science team than a token member of the Canadian military contingent, traded as political pawns to guarantee cooperation with the U.S. on the project.

“Well,” she said, too casually, “do your best to put away any potentially defamatory things you want to say—he’s being pulled from another SGC project especially for this.”

Rodney narrowed his eyes. “You’re not telling me something,” he said, matter-of-fact.

“Oh,” Weir said, smiling as she stepped into the lift, hand over the UP button. “Only that he’s got an Ancient gene that lit up our entire SGC lab of unidentified Ancient technology.”

Rodney gaped at her, feeling uselessly around for words to give scope to his emotions.

“Coming?” Weir asked, just as Rodney heard the sound of helicopter blades overhead.

*

Dr. John Sheppard was not as excited about joining the project as Rodney was to have him on board.

“It was a fluke!” Sheppard yelled over the sounds of the helo blades, glasses fogged up as he tromped through the snowdrifts after General O’Neill, who wore a staid expression of long-suffering like a mask. “It could have been any of six million environmental factors that contributed to initiating the Ancient technology!”

“General,” Weir said when O’Neill drew closer, and Rodney couldn’t help but straighten his back a little—even if he was wearing orange fleece.

“Dr. Weir,” O’Neill ground out.

“Let me go back to Area 51,” Sheppard said, first to the general and then to Weir. “Was this your idea?”

“Oh, God,” the general said, adding, “Okay, we have to go inside before we continue this because he’s been going on like this since McMurdo and I can’t take it anymore.”

Ten minutes and a brief and invasive security check later, Sheppard was rubbing the steam off the lenses of his glasses as he tailed the General around the Antarctic complex, pleading his case and using words like, “civilian contractor” and “you can’t jerk me around like this” and “I want to go back to the airplanes!”

“Dr. Sheppard, I assure you that your skills won’t be wasted here, either,” Weir soothed once the man had finally been cornered in a lab, staring mulishly at the blackboard where Daniel had left his translation half-finished in favor of tearing off after Jack. He’d had a look on his face that gave Rodney the idea the general was pretty familiar with bitching scientists.

“Lady,” Sheppard started, “I haven’t slept in nearly three days. Less than a week ago I was in Nevada—where it’s warm—building secret airplanes—which was cool—and then I go to have a chat with one of my buddies down in processing and a bunch of dead machinery starts booting up. Suddenly I’m being pulled away from my projects and forced onto a charter plane to Antarctica—which is melting—and then tossed onto a helicopter with somebody who tried to peer-pressure me into joining your crew.”

Elizabeth winced. Rodney bit his lip really, really hard.

“Right now,” Sheppard snarled, “the only skills I need to be using here are the ones that are going to let me hotwire a helicopter and fly back to Nevada.”

“I apologize for the way we went about getting your attention,” Elizabeth rushed to say, trying to smile and glare at Rodney’s barely repressed hysterics at the same time.

“Get my attention?” Sheppard yelled, furious. “That’s practically kidnapping! They didn’t even let me go home and get clothes! I’m wearing some poor marine private’s underpants—they have his name stitched in the back!”

Sheppard must have used some kind of bleeding heart keyword in there because Elizabeth’s face suddenly crumpled into such an expression of distress that Rodney put his ‘I’m a scientist, you can trust me’ shit-eating smile on and stepped in front of her.

“Okay, so the methodology wasn’t graceful,” he conceded, wondering if Sheppard’s eyes really could shoot green lasers and if the lenses of his glasses would somehow save Rodney from certain death if they did. “But Dr. Weir’s right when she says that the opportunities far outstrip anything you could be doing at Area 51.”

He smiled at Sheppard hopefully.

“Are you building anything?” Sheppard demanded.

“Um, no, but we’re reverse engineering some really exciting—”

“Are you guys flying anything?” Sheppard followed up.

“Well, if you count the drones—”

“Is this project seriously based in a glacier in Antarctica?” Sheppard snapped.

Rodney scowled. “It’s not like there aren’t any heaters.”

John threw up his hands. “Fantastic, make the melting worse!” He sighed, shoulders slumping in exhaustion. “Look, I’m happy that you guys love whatever—”

And whatever else Sheppard was going to say was cut off by the sound of one of the jarheads yelling, “Get down!” and the crashing of what Rodney saw briefly was a drone going ballistic before he grabbed both Elizabeth and Sheppard and threw them to the ground—covering Sheppard with one arm carefully folded over the back of his head.

“What the fuck was that?” he shouted, staying low even as the crashing noises dissipated—which just made Radek’s high-pitched, incoherent shrieks more audible, and Rodney pushed himself off of a put-out looking Sheppard and ran toward the yelling, where Zelenka was waving hysterically at Beckett, who was near tears in the chair.

“I told you I shouldn’t sit in the chair,” Beckett moaned, his face completely white.

“Oh, Jesus, it’s locked onto one of the incoming choppers,” Kavanagh yelled in the background, rushing up to the chair and saying, “Turn it off—shut it down!”

“I’m trying!” Beckett yelled back. “But they didn’t exactly teach a stream in advanced telepathy in bloody medical school!”

“ETA two minutes!” somebody yelled and Rodney hit the level of panic that made the entire universe separate out into easily computed segments, and he thought, oh, of course, before he rushed over to grab a still-sullen Sheppard and yell, “Get in the chair!”

Sheppard said, “What?” but by then Rodney had already tossed Beckett out of it and pushed Sheppard in—

And the difference was night and day, the entire cove lighting blue and humming in low, alien harmonics and Sheppard’s eyes widening in shock, in something like memory, Rodney thought briefly, and then yelled, “Think off!” and Sheppard did.

Later, Rodney said, “Okay, now think about where we are in the universe.”

Almost immediately, suspended overhead like a hologram was the deep inky black of space and the ethereal white of burning stars and reds of nearby atmospheres, planets and rings of meteorites and the geography of a limitless plane. Then something shifted, and the whole image changed into—

“Oh my God,” Rodney said, from where he was curled up on the floor cross-legged, a tablet PC in his lap, eyes wide in amazement, “is that space in four dimensions?”

Sheppard made a blissful noise. “It’s much prettier than I’ve been imagining.”

“Wow,” Rodney said, reverent.

“Yeah,” Sheppard agreed.

“Okay, stop with the weird nerd porno,” General O’Neill snapped, totally ruining the moment. And when Rodney turned to glare at him accusingly the man seemed completely unperturbed by it, looking over Rodney’s head and saying to Sheppard, “Look, it’s fantastic that you guys are finally getting somewhere, so the last remaining question is whether or not you want the job.”

*

“What do you mean you don’t want the job?” Rodney demanded, baffled and trailing Sheppard around the Antarctic base. “How can you not want the job? The job is amazing!”

Sheppard rolled his eyes and continued to wind around the hallways without any apparent purpose, peering into rooms here and there and passing again the chalkboard where Daniel was puzzling at the sequence of gate addresses again, a white set of fingerprints on his own face where he’d touched his cheek absently.

“Rodney, my job is already amazing, and it doesn’t even involve having to leave Earth to do it,” Sheppard said, patience wearing thin after only three hours of concentrated harassment. Wuss, Rodney thought meanly, Sheppard would have never made it in the military. “Like I told Elizabeth and the General earlier, I’m honored and flattered to be invited, but I can do the SGC much more good at Area 51.”

Rodney scowled. “What, building your little airplanes?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Sheppard snarled, glaring. “Don’t you have something else do do?” He glanced down at Rodney’s BDUs and sighed. “You’re not even on the science team—will you leave me alone already?”

“You’re just scared,” Rodney accused, crossing his arms over his chest.

“It’s true,” Sheppard said insincerely. “Wormholes freak me out. Can I go now?”

Rodney’s scowl deepened. “Do you know how many people would give an arm and a leg to be on this project?” he snapped. “And Elizabeth might be putting up a brave little toaster front but the fact of the matter is that we need you on this.”

“McKay,” Sheppard said patiently, shaping his words carefully, “I might not look like it, but I once took a self-defense class in college and given how pissed I am right now, I could do some serious damage.”

He looked meaningfully between his sneaker and Rodney’s crotch and Rodney winced automatically—years of military training aside, he’d still always had problems injuring attractive people.

“All I want is a hot shower, somewhere to sleep for about thirty hours, and then a ride home, understand?” Sheppard said, supernaturally calm, voice even and soft.

“But—”

Sheppard raised his eyebrows.

“It’s just that—”

His mouth tightened into a flat, angry line.

“Fine. Yes. Understood,” Rodney sulked.

“Good,” Sheppard said, too sweetly and disappeared around the corner.

*

“What’re you doing?” Sheppard asked, horrified.

Rodney tried not to find Sheppard’s deeply loathing expression cute, but it was hard, given how he wrinkled his nose and how his glasses always seemed frosted over in the cold.

“Don’t be like that, Sheppard,” Rodney said jauntily, patting the empty seat next to him in the helicopter even as Sheppard shared a wordless glance with the pilot, who only shook his head in resignation. “Come on in, I thought I’d take a break and head back with you.”

“To McMurdo,” Sheppard said flatly, sliding into the helicopter and still glaring at him.

“Well, first,” Rodney said sweetly. “Then I was thinking I’d hop on whatever charter they’d send you home to Nevada on, and then I thought I might hang around your project for a while, offer my insights.”

Sheppard glared.

“You don’t need to worry about my qualifications,” Rodney soothed. “I’m terribly brilliant—probably the smartest man you’ll ever meet.”

“Can you throw him out of this helicopter?” Sheppard asked the pilot.

“No,” the pilot said back, sounding sad. “I also can’t leave while he’s sitting in it—he’s not cleared for the trip back.”

“God damn it,” Sheppard muttered, slumping back into his seat and crossing his arms, scowling at Rodney for a long, unblinking moment before he said:

“Be honest with me. Why do you want me so bad?”

The pilot made a choking noise and Rodney ignored it to say, “Because the alternative is Derek Kavanagh—and he got to his position through sheer ass kissing. He’s an idiot and a coward and he’d sell out any science any time to turn a buck or gain some fame and we need better than him.”

Sheppard kept staring. “Why me.”

Rodney flushed.

“Look,” he said, mortified he was being driven to such lengths as telling the truth. “First and foremost, you have the Ancient gene—and I know you don’t understand the gravity of that, but we’ve spent months trying to find somebody for our expedition like you, who had an intuitive link with the technology.”

Something about the longing in Rodney’s voice must have resonated, because Sheppard’s furious expression faltered, and he just started to look conflicted.

“What’s more,” Rodney went on, lowering his voice, “I don’t want to be marginalized on this expedition, Dr. Sheppard—I have doctorates out the ass and an IQ of more than 200. I know more about science and research in my little finger than Kavanagh—and he’s been kicking me out of the labs since I got here.”

“You’re technically part of the military contingent,” Sheppard pointed out.

“And Will Hunting was a janitor!” Rodney snapped. “And military and mental ability aren’t mutually exclusive, Dr. Sheppard, and for that matter—”

“Oh, God,” Sheppard said, rolling his eyes. “For the record, McKay, I have nothing against the armed forces. Not even Canada’s.”

Rodney scowled, but soldiered on, saying, “Look, the point is that while you were throwing a hissy fit back there to get home, I looked you up: you’re smart, you’re not resistant to change, and I get the impression that you’re the kind of guy that wouldn’t care if I was military or housekeeping—if I could do the job you’d let me help, am I right?”

Sheppard put his face in his hands. “McKay—Rodney, I can’t just dump my work.”

“This isn’t just any trip, Dr. Sheppard,” Rodney said urgently. “You’d be going further than mankind’s ever gone—you’ve what, seen the inside of a spaceship? Built new and interesting airplanes? If you stay, you’ll be walking through living physics. You’ll be redrawing our understanding of the universe—this is cartography on a level most people can’t even imagine.”

Sheppard looked like he was beginning to capitulate.

“Come on,” Rodney said, wearing his best and most charming smile, his, don’t you want to see what amazing scientific toys we can discover smile. “You know you want this.”

Sighing, Sheppard said, “You realize my entire staff is going to kill me unless they can come with me, right?”

Rodney blinked. “Really?”

Sheppard looked grim. “Really.”

*

Sheppard’s initial reluctance melted away once he committed to the project, which he managed to do with surprisingly little complaining and bitching, and it turned out that his prickliness really was just a matter of wearing a stranger’s underpants and not having slept for close to 36 hours.

A hot shower and an open-faced turkey sandwich later, he was in the labs charming the pants off of everybody he came near, showing a curiosity and wonder about everything that had most of the science team repressing indulgent smiles. Five hours of lighting things up with his mind later, he was finally dragged out of the labs and into one of the conference rooms to deal with the inevitable paperwork and politics.

Despite his best efforts to worm his way into the science labs for the next three days Sheppard was at the base, Rodney wasn’t particularly successful and the next thing he knew John was on his way back to Nevada—presumably to recruit his own staff members for the project.

“Is that really wise?” Rodney had asked, deeply concerned about his own opportunities for research if Sheppard was stacking the deck with his own loyalists.

“I don’t even want to talk about it,” Elizabeth had said, pawing through her desk for ibuprofen. “He kept saying if we didn’t let him do it he wouldn’t come and then lighting things up in the lab to distract Daniel and crumble his resolve.”

The next time Rodney saw Sheppard was the pre-mission orientation, when all the scientists were shuffled into a room together and all the military were shuffled into another room, and both groups were shown insulting videos about space crabs and alien culture sensitivity. Somewhere between “So You Have Some Interesting Purple Growths Down There” and “Watch Where You Pee—That Might Not Be A Urinal,” Rodney spotted Sheppard in the SGC mess and invited himself over.

“See,” he said by way of hello, “aren’t you really glad you let me win you over?”

Sheppard just grinned at him over the silver frames of his glasses. “Every night, Rodney, I clutch a pink lacy pillow to my chest and murmur words of gratitude,” he told him, deadpan, and reached over to steal a French fry off of Rodney’s tray. “How’re the military orientations going?”

Rodney smirked and reached for his coffee. “Fine. Lots of questions about hookers, if there’re space hookers, what kind of space hookers there are—that sort of thing.”

The jarheads were all grunts and steely determination, and Rodney, who’d not only joined the Air Force but the Canadian Air Force, was a lot more about tactics and what they could design to move the quickest away from certain death than he was about running full speed at it bleeding red, white and blue. He hadn’t really done more than the barest minimum of training since he’d suffered years of 6:30 a.m. reveille at the Royal Military College. But the international contingents had been forced to make their peace with the fact that the military presence on Atlantis would be predominantly American, in part because the U.S. was sinking the most funding into it and in part because they were the most willing to send their best and brightest off on suicide missions for what amounted to desperate curiosity.

Rodney, to fit in better with his new colleagues, had been doing a lot more PT than he was used to—a lot. There was sore and then there was I just went three rounds with a male hooker on pure crystal meth in Vegas.

“The science team’s not much better,” Sheppard admitted fondly, leaning one cheek on his hand and pushing his laptop aside. “Just replace hookers with questions about is it just like Firefly, do they get to be space cowboys.” There was a brief, hopeful pause.

Rodney rolled his eyes. “It’s not just like Firefly, Sheppard.”

“Damn it,” Sheppard said with a note of genuine regret. “That ship was awesome.”

“It’s the lost city of the Ancients,” Rodney shot back, trying to repress his grin. “It’s automatically going to be more awesome than Firefly.”

Sheppard gave him another one of those over-the-frames looks that could be interpreted in an entirely flirtatious way and said mildly, “I’m holding you to that, you know.”

“Oh like I can be held responsible for the degree of awesome a lost city I’ve never been to is,” Rodney retorted.

He felt lame and fifteen all over again, trying to make friends with the cool kids in the cafeteria. Only Sheppard had glasses and two Ph.Ds and probably hadn’t dated cheerleaders or acted as the high school’s star quarterback. But Rodney had given up riotous arguments in physics departments for a regimented chain of command decades ago, and it was strange, suddenly, not just to be working closely with it again—but to miss it fiercely, to wish he belonged.

“John is prone to requiring unreasonable things,” a heavily accented voice interrupted, and Rodney glanced to Sheppard’s side to see a wild-haired, slight man holding a tray, the lenses of his glasses dotted with fingerprints. “Do you mind, John?”

“Well, not if you’re going to keep saying mean things about me,” John pouted even as he shifted a few files out of the way. “Doctor Radek Zelenka, meet Major Rodney McKay of the Royal Canadian Air Force,” he said, and leaning over to Radek, he said in a mock whisper, “This is the guy who talked me into this.”

Zelenka leveled a speculative look at Rodney. “So you are the reason we make this suicide mission instead of very fast planes in Area 51.”

Rodney flushed. “You didn’t have to come,” he said.

“Oh, no no,” Zelenka soothed, grinning. “Was going to thank you.”

John started to gather his things, shutting his laptop and stacking it on top of his mass of notes, winking at Rodney as he got up.

“Told you,” he said, and started out of the cafeteria, arms full and calling over his shoulder, “Resource meeting at 1800 hours, Radek.”

Rodney’s expression as he stared after John must have been particularly lustful, because Radek cleared his throat loudly, and by the time Rodney’s eyes refocused, Radek was looking equal parts bemused and unsurprised.

“Uh,” Rodney said, mortified.

“Do not be embarrassed, Major McKay. You are not first, and will not be last,” Radek said, smirking.

And then his expression transformed into one of pure evil and murmured something poisonous in Czech—three nearby scientists dropped their forks, turning in their seats to turn and stare in open-mouthed horror.

“What the hell was that?” Rodney demanded. “What did you just say?”

Radek put on a face of total innocence. “The same thing I say to all of John’s potential suitors—I wish you no luck,” he said primly, and applied himself to picking at his mystery meat.

*

Rodney spent the next two weeks watching in amazement as Sheppard and Zelenka collectively bamboozled the existing science team into believing that they were the second coming and that unicorns flew out of their asses.

“You’re real bitter for somebody who basically body checked me into agreeing to take this job,” Sheppard said mildly, polishing his glasses with the hem of his black t-shirt while Rodney tried not to out himself as a flaming pervert by staring at the tiny, tempting flashes of stomach John was showing off.

He was saved from doing something really embarrassing like offering to lick the largest prime into John’s belly when Zelenka walked by and unsubtly slapped him in the side with a clipboard.

“I am sure this is how Major McKay expresses his affection,” Zelenka said smoothly, giving Sheppard a wry smile and leaning over to check one of their simulations before he frowned. “This does not look right.”

Rodney lost both of them, then, to one of their more quiet, thoughtful debates, the kind where nobody threw up their hands or snapped or made any your momma jokes, of which Zelenka had a truly staggering and somewhat troubling number. They were talking about power curves and planning for the long-term possibilities, and it took a lot for Rodney to push down the urge to invite himself into the conversation, to say nosily, “Okay, let me see some of these numbers you two keep bitching about,” and “You realize I’m smarter than both of you combined right? And that only the sheer perversity of life kept me from being in your exact position and claiming you both as minions?”

And it was at that exact moment that Sheppard held up a hand and turned to him, raising an eyebrow curiously and saying, “Hey, McKay—you wanna take a look at this?”

Rodney didn’t say, “I think I love you,” but it was a near thing.

“Well?” Zelenka asked, expectant, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. He turned to Sheppard. “I fear he may have fabricated all of his degrees.”

“That’d be sad,” Sheppard said back seriously. “And also lame.”

“All right,” Rodney said, flushing and pushing toward the simulation computer, “no more comments from the peanut gallery.”

Rodney could feel Sheppard’s smile very near him, and although he tried hard, he couldn’t help but to understand—just a little—why people might think the world of the guy.

Rodney was, at heart, a theorist. His ideas and his math had always been too large for the context of reality, so sweeping and huge that he disappeared into the science, tiny against the size of his thoughts. He was a genius, there was no denying it and no reason to—and the way he saw reality was different than other people around him.

Sheppard on the other hand, knew the language behind the philosophy, like being fluent in Greek and having only a passing familiarity with poetry. He was a mathematician, with a mind like a calculator that spent most of his waking hours categorizing and estimating, creating the logic behind Rodney and Zelenka’s larger theories. Rodney had once thought people like Sheppard were intellectually crippled in the cruelest way: smart enough to understand but not brilliant enough to realize ideas in the first place.

But having Sheppard around to instantly give flesh to the ideas Rodney and Radek thought up in a babbling mess was a humbling experience—like describing the universe and seeing it appear. Like Sheppard had stumbled into all of this to begin with, by sitting in a chair and listening to Rodney when he’d said, “Now think of where we are in the universe.”

“Is this what you’ve always wanted?” Sheppard asked, standing in front of the gate on departure day, looking serene in the absolute chaos.

Rodney frowned at him. “What—Atlantis?”

Shaking his head, Sheppard smirked, asking, “The perfect excuse to be a scientist and a soldier.”

“Oh, well,” Rodney said, feeling strangely shy. “I never planned for the soldier part.”

“Yeah?” John said, raising his brows.

“Yeah,” Rodney admitted. “You? Atlantis? Wormhole physics.”

Sheppard laughed. “Let’s just say I never planned for the scientist part.” He grinned at Rodney, part rueful, part wistful. “I wanted to fly planes.”

Elizabeth’s voice carried throughout the gate room, and called them all to gather, because in just a few minutes—they’d be taking the biggest first steps of their lives, and the echo seemed to make it all seem larger, even more frightening, and Rodney felt his blood roaring in his ears.

“I’ll teach you how to fly them,” Rodney said suddenly, thinking for no reason of the white board in Sheppard’s lab, covered in scrawl that was equal parts his and Radek’s and Rodney’s. “I mean—I’ll teach you how to fly Ancient planes—if we find them.”

John’s grin was wide enough to break his face. “I’m holding you to that,” he said, and then a swarm of scientists in beige and blue came and swept him away, toward the ZPM and their mess of wires, a pile of mechanical engineering that was neither elegant nor beautiful, and Rodney watched him go for just a minute before he turned back to the ramp, to see Elizabeth’s face, bright with possibility.

“Excited?” she asks him.

“Cautiously optimistic,” Rodney corrected.

She smiled at him. “That’s the best we can hope for, I guess.”

Rodney thought about Sheppard and his love affair with the Ancient technology, of Zelenka’s babbling Czech and the dozens on dozens of jarheads who seemed like bruisers but secretly had between them the entire run of Felicity and The O.C. and the first three season of the new Battlestar Galactica. He thought about Elizabeth’s joy, her curiosity, so huge and shining that it’d romanced the IOA and General O’Neill and the SGC at large—Atlantis is hers already at heart, and Rodney thought that maybe ‘cautiously optimistic’ was shooting a bit low.

“I guess,” Rodney allowed, and let the rest of his thoughts melt into the grind and roar of the gate initializing, Walter in the control room saying, “Chevron one is locked and loaded,” and Sheppard running back into the room saying, “Okay, okay, I’m back—what’d I miss?”

“Nothing,” Rodney tells him. “Nothing—we’re just getting started.”


	2. Atlantis, later

“I’m beginning to reconsider my claim that you were a superior choice to Derek Kavanagh,” Rodney snarled, hands twitching at his sides from uselessness.

John tried to glower at him from his spot collapsed on the floor of the puddlejumper, but the enormous bug attached to his neck really took all the bite out of the look—an astonishing feat that Rodney felt should be memorialized in song and dance for the scientists who’d been on the wrong end of that glare already.

“You’re not helping, McKay,” John said, but his voice was almost as pale as his face and Rodney couldn’t help thinking: this is my fault, he could be in Nevada, where it’s warm.

“Well I’m not the one who went and tripped into the most evil-looking spider web in the world,” Rodney snapped, feeling his blood pressure rising dangerously, sharing a look with Teyla over John’s head.

“I was running from the Wraith,” John countered, but it lacked effect.

“We were all running from the Wraith, but nobody else fell into evil-looking spiderwebs,” Rodney chastised. “Look,” he said, and he wasn’t sure who he was reassuring anymore, “we’ll be back in Atlantis in no time—” in the background he heard Markham and Stackhouse’s voices, the sound of the DHD “—and we can let Carson work his voodoo on you, all right?”

“I love voodoo,” Sheppard said faintly.

“Figures,” Rodney said, keeping one hand on Sheppard’s wrist and feeling his thready pulse, erratic but still going. “Let me guess, you go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras? Ask girls to flash you for beads?”

John smiled at him wearily. “Actually, I flash people for beads.”

“You slut,” Rodney said, trying not to sound affectionate and failing utterly.

Teyla smiled at them both, and Ford repressed a chuckle. “You will have to explain to me this celebration some day, John,” Teyla said quietly—and then the jumper jammed in the gate.

*

Screaming at Markham and Stackhouse through the puddle was utterly pointless, but Rodney did it anyway because it felt good to be mean to somebody, and Sheppard was too pale and in too much tight-lipped pain for Rodney to go to his default settings. Teyla and Ford were flashing him evil expressions, but he couldn’t bring himself to care: getting jammed in the Stargate and dying in the unforgiving vacuum of space wasn’t on his itinerary for the day and he was pissed.

Rodney was halfway through telling the shimmering blue of the wormhole about all the branches in their family tree that intersected with animals and didn’t split properly when Rodney feels Sheppard close his hand around Rodney’s ankle.

“Rodney,” Sheppard said, voice pained and breaking. “Focus.”

He swallows the last of his rant and exhales. “I am focusing. This is how I focus.”

“This is why your former commanding officer wrote that note in your service jacket, you know, “ John said weakly and closed his eyes. “Open the control panel—we have to—”

“—Retract the drive pods manually, got it,” Rodney said, reaching automatically for Sheppard’s tablet laptop, his third limb and unofficial fifth member of the team, and he was halfway through pulling down the control panel on the side of the jumper when he turned to Sheppard to say, “You hacked my service record?”

“You threatened to stalk me back to Nevada,” Sheppard managed painfully and let out a wheezing, high-pitched noise before Teyla smoothed her palm over his forehead and Ford fumbled around looking for the first aid kit. “Be careful with Gina.”

“I’m not even discussing how you gave your computer a hooker name right now,” Rodney said, distracted, and pulled up Sheppard’s exhaustive jumper schematics, lovingly detailed.

“Doc, how are you feeling?” Ford asked, pawing through the first aid kit—and Rodney saw he came up with bandages, iodine, aspirin, and wished Ford would find a field dose of morphine, although he wasn’t sure that Sheppard would take it.

He got stupidly brave for a guy who’d only ever learned to throw a punch in a class with twenty-three other undergrad girls and say he needed to stay lucid, stay focused. Sheppard reacted in times of crisis, intersections between military and science by getting grim and determined and sleek and Rodney wondered sometimes if he ever managed to teach the man how to shoot properly, would he be as dangerous as he sometimes looked.

“Fantastic,” Sheppard muttered. “Teyla, Lieutenent—I don’t care how, just get this damn thing off of me.”

“John,” Teyla murmured, soothing and worried and soft, “last time we tried we almost lost you.”

“We did everything we could think of on the planet already, Doc,” Ford reminded him gently, and Rodney winced, remembering Sheppard’s broken sobs after the sound of gunfire had echoed down, his bloodless face.

“Don’t be stupid,” he interrupted, feeling numb and panicked and slow, letting his officer training kick in where reasoned thought was starting to abandon him. “Just stay still and keep breathing, and I’ll have us out of here in no time.”

*

Rodney had learned loyalty at the RMC and brotherhood from service but he was starting to think he hadn’t really understood protectiveness until he felt himself pulling the trigger on the P-90 that day—fear and anger and the already-swallowing sense of loss rolling up his spine, seeing John on his knees and gasping, the Wraith staring down at him.

Rodney thought maybe the knee-jerk sentimentality would fade after he finally escaped from the debriefing from hell—where Teyla and Ford had abandoned him, the traitors—to find John explaining what flashing was to Teyla, and why he had accumulated a small fortune in shiny plastic necklaces over the years.

But it didn’t. And instead, Rodney had only rolled his eyes and moaned in embarrassment and wandered up to John’s hospital bed, closed his hand over John’s ankle, still underneath the sheets but warm, warm through the blanket to Rodney’s touch, and chastised him for shaming the entire human race.

“I can say that now,” Rodney snapped. “You’re supposed to be an ambassador for our kind—not a blemish.”

The day after that, Teyla brought John a string of wooden Athosian beads, smiling naughtily. “We had to cut open your shirt, John,” she laughs. “I wanted to make sure you did not feel cheated.”

Rodney thought—demoralized—that it probably didn’t speak well of the types of missions they’d end up having, but it didn’t seem to matter, sitting at John’s beside with Teyla and Ford and John’s ill-gotten beads.

They were on Atlantis and they were still alive and that was more amazing than anything even Rodney had anticipated doing.

*

The science team was unnaturally protective of their intrepid leader, which Rodney learned the hard way after he suffered a week of cold showers and cold shoulders after the shenanigans on the Genii home planet, where John had been slapped around a lot. Apparently, it showed—and where broken bones and sprained ankles and unavoidable run-ins with evil alien catfish with hand vaginas were forgivable, or at least subject to distributed blame, it seemed that the emotional drain of seeing John wandering around the labs looking like a victim of domestic abuse was just too much.

Rodney couldn’t exactly blame them, since he indulged in the exact same retributive behavior when it was other people doing the bone-breaking and kidnapping. He was firm in his belief that the only people in the world allowed to punch John Sheppard in the mouth were members of the Atlantis expedition—who frequently had very good reasons for wanting to deck John Sheppard and ought to be encouraged to express themselves.

But all the same, the amount of time Rodney had taken to spending in the labs—if not suspicious in the sense that John had co-opted him as an unofficial member of the physics team—was highly suspect for the amount of time Rodney spent in the lab staring.

“I see your problem is more persistent than most I have seen,” Zelenka mused.

Rodney turned six colors of red and forced himself to stop staring, besotted, as John fucked around with an Ancient fractal program, making delighted noises. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied, sounding wretched even to his own ears.

“Please,” Zelenka scoffed. “John declared it free day in lab. Half these computers are calculating likelihood John will give in to your lascivious yearning.”


	3. Atlantis, even later

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (a fragment)

Rodney couldn’t hear himself thinking over the sound of the rain, but he could feel everything: the sting of water coming down like hail and the thunderous vibration of it slamming against the ballasts of the city.

In almost any other situation he might think bitterly that when it rained, it really poured, but the irony was just too grotesque and Rodney forced himself to think fast, to think on his feet. In Atlantis, he relied more on being a soldier than being a scientist, although with John and Elizabeth at the helm the two seemed to intersect more than Rodney had ever thought they could.

“You must be Dr. Sheppard,” the voice had said, tinny through the radio, and Rodney had felt something in his chest seize when he’d heard John say, “They’re Genii,” his voice edged with wariness, brave despite the memory of bruises.

All Rodney could think about as he tore through the city was that John still couldn’t throw a proper punch. That he was only starting to learn to defend himself with a gun and his hands and tactical thinking—to stop referencing Rainbow Six when he should be remembering to block. All Rodney could think about was John and Elizabeth in the control room with Kolya—the city crumbling around them in the fierceness of the storm.

The jumpers were reticent with him, not nearly as fond of Rodney as they were of John, but his panic must have translated, because the doors opened a little faster, a little more eager to help—and Rodney raided a jumper, gathered what he could, and—

“Elizabeth, we should give him what he needs: C-4, the medical supplies, the Wraith recording device,” Sheppard’s voice came over the citywide, too-tight to be anything but scared and frustrated.

Rodney headed toward the armory, listening as John said, “None of that’s worth dying for,” but then the other voice, like rolling gravel was back, and it said, “Step away from the console,” and there was nothing more.

He hid the C-4 first, because he could hardly lock off the infirmary and the Wraith recording device was in the winding nexus of offices behind the gateroom—too close for him to hazard. And it was too many long, long minutes until he heard the radio static and the voice from before, saying, “This is Commander Kolya.”

“A name to go with the voice, finally, I can’t say it’s good to meet you,” Rodney sneered, climbing to the city’s arching catwalk, fingers tightening on the grip of his P-90 and straining his ears to hear Elizabeth, hear John in the background—to hear either of the men he’d put on gate duty that day. “My name is Major Rodney McKay. In case you’re wondering, I’m the one who hid the C-4—in a place you will never find it.”

“That’s very good,” Kolya said, but Rodney could hear the smile in his voice. “But I have the suspicion, Major, that there’s a plan to save the city.”

Scowling, he paused. “On what are you basing this?” Rodney demanded.

“Well,” Kolya said mildly, voice crackling over the connection, “Dr. Sheppard has been…less than cooperative and Dr. Weir seems determined to keep her silence as well—if you didn’t have anything to protect, I can’t imagine it’d be worth having Dr. Sheppard bleeding out on the floor of the control room.”

It felt like a punch to the gut, somebody kicking him in the solar plexus, that first, terrible time he’d seen a Wraith—saw her eyes scraping down the length of his body and her hand reaching toward him: ice in his veins.

“Let me speak to him,” Rodney snarled.

“He’s not feeling very talkative,” Kolya replied.

Rodney let out a shaking breath. “Let me rephrase that: can he speak to me?”

“Perhaps once he’s woken up,” he told Rodney agreeably, and Rodney had to stop for moment, to put a hand against the wall and shut his eyes against his imagination, to put away the fear clawing up his throat and focus on anger. To focus on being infuriated. “And Dr. Weir has a strong conviction not to negotiate—I was hoping you’d be more reasonable, Major.”

“Then clearly you’ve been told nothing but lies about me,” Rodney snapped.

“What a shame,” Kolya laughed. “But nevertheless, if you complete your plan to save the city, I would be happy to let you and Drs Weir and Sheppard leave the city unharmed.” A beat. “Or at least with no additional injuries.”

Rodney felt the beginnings of one of his infamous rage blackouts developing between his eyes, and it took every bit of training he’d ever received to make himself say, “I thought you just wanted C-4 and some medical supplies.”

“Why raid a city when you can take the city. You have quite an extraordinary place here, Major McKay,” Kolya said reasonably. “Atlantis will be mine or the ocean’s, it’s your decision.”

*

Rodney didn’t know if either Kolya or his strike team had figured out how to use the city sensors, but he kept a careful grip on the life signs detector, creeping away from the last power distribution center to the lab overlooking the south pier—John’s pet lab. It was a room with enormous windows and filled with coffee mugs, motivational posters of kittens in trees looking pitifully determined, whiteboards covered in John’s characteristic scrawl.

And Rodney picked a lab terminal at random and coaxed his way into the intricate security network John had written for Atlantis—the double and triple checks that Sheppard had created, and jumped through all of John’s hoops until he finally cleared the final test—“What is your quest?”—and was in.

“Okay,” Rodney said to himself, “okay: what would Sheppard do?”

It only took him a few minutes, then, inside the labyrinthine heart of Atlantis’ language of base-twelve to lock the Genii out of the city, to close down all but essential life support functions and their duct-tape and prayer plan to power the shield—to conveniently run down the nearest flight of stairs to disable a naquadah generator, and then another, and then another, until the city was cloaked in darkness.

Ford radioed in that first instant of darkness, voice crackling in the storm, and he and Rodney came up with a tactical plan that essentially consisted of Rodney snarling at him for still being on the mainland and intimating that if Ford didn’t get his scrawny ass back to the city as quickly as safely possible, Rodney would hurt him. “Let me just sedate Dr. Beckett, then,” Ford said, amused. “Ford out.”

After that, it was easy, easy to slip down quiet hallways he’d kept open, to slowly, systematically pick off members of the strike team, baffled by tightly-shut doors, the deep black of Atlantis in sleep—easy to lock in the iris before his eyes strayed to where Elizabeth was huddled with John’s head in her lap, her expedition-gray pants black with blood.

And Rodney was barely aware of the surge roaring over the city and the crackle of lighting, the high-pitched hum of the shield coming online outside the windows as the storm blew wild outside—seeing only the mess of bloody gashes and cloth that now constituted John’s left arm, all of his broken fingers.

*

Later, the other soldiers on Atlantis would murmur with quiet awe about Rodney McKay, who spent more time in the labs than the gym but had killed 55 men with a Stargate—who’d electrocuted another ten. They’d murmur about how McKay had taken back the city with little more help than Teyla and Ford, sent Kolya tripping backward through the Stargate with a bullet in the shoulder.

They’d also talk about Dr. Sheppard, who would probably wear long sleeves for the rest of his life, even on the very hottest days of summer, to hide the criss-crossing network of scars on his left arm—how he’d refused to talk and nearly bitten through his own mouth, bitten his lip bloody to keep quiet.

It was all true.

What they wouldn’t know was that Rodney had fallen to his knees, pants soaking up the trail of blood and eyes round with horror. They didn’t know how Elizabeth had said, sounding rote and exhausted and heartbroken, stroking John’s pale face, “He wouldn’t say a word—he told them you’d kill him anyway if he talked.”

And they wouldn’t know that later that day—deep into the Atlantean night—Rodney had sent Teyla and Ford away, and kept a vigil in the infirmary at John’s bedside, trying to decide if he was horrified or proud. Wondering if it was possible to be both. But mostly, he hurt, all over, not just muscle sore or with a deep, bone ache, but a comprehensive pain that burned beneath his skin.

“You should have talked,” Rodney told John’s unmoving body, told his slowly rising and falling chest. “You should have talked the moment he took out a knife.”

 

Atlantis, somewhat after that

There were times when Rodney found himself considering serious bodily injury to drag John away from his “Wait—this is really interesting, do you see the faint imprint of something that could potentially be useful if we re-engineer it based on three wishes and my ass?” obsession with Ancient toys.

But mostly, most frequently, Rodney thought indulgently, watching John work in the field was kind of wonderful. Loathe as he did to admit it, Rodney was occasionally struck with the irredeemably soppy thought that John was all the best things in life: a bright, burning curiosity and wry, easygoing smile, the stubbornness to push through it and unrepentant delight—about science, about flight, about Atlantis.

“Elizabeth, this is just huge,” John babbled, waving his hands around. “This could be huger than huge. Elizabeth, I’m not kidding, this is—”

Rodney slapped them back down onto the jumper consoles and said warningly, “We talked about this, Sheppard.”

On the radio, Elizabeth was laughing at them. “I see you’re excited,” she said indulgently.

“

There were times when Rodney was tempted to throw John to the Wraith—namely Arcturus, after which John spent a month buried in his work, mourning his dead scientist and fighting with Colonel Caldwell, arguing that it was too dangerous to go back, that he wouldn’t work on it, that one person too many had already died for prurient scientific interest. The only thing uglier on Sheppard than self-pity was slavish guilt, the way he got thinner and meaner and just a little bit brittle, skipping meals and losing sleep.

It spoke to how dear John was to the science team that they held out almost an entire month before Zelenka threw a laptop at John and chased him out of the lab, staging a coup.

“I don’t see how this is a security situation at all,” Rodney said to him innocently when John showed up at his door, huffing in fury with dark circles under his eyes.

“He threw me out of the lab!” John protested, wild-eyed. “He threw a laptop at me!”

Rodney raised an eyebrow, leaning against his doorframe.

“Oh,” John said disgusted, “oh this is just perfect! Of course to stage a successful overthrow you have you have the military on your side.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Circuitous [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3650151) by [librarychick_94](https://archiveofourown.org/users/librarychick_94/pseuds/librarychick_94)




End file.
